Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Tom Stoppard

Act III: Beginning of the Act until the Letter Switch

Important Quotations Explained

Summary

Rosencrantz watches the morning dawn and says that things
could have turned out worse than they have. The two men hear the
sounds of the Tragedians’ music, which is nearby but muffled. Rosencrantz walks
around the stage, trying to find the source of the music. He soon
realizes that it is coming from the Tragedians, inside the barrels.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sit and listen until the song comes
to an end, at which point the Player and his group emerge.

The Player reveals that their play angered Claudius to
such an extent that they had to escape in costumes and stow away
onboard the ship. Guildenstern tells the Player that they are free
now that things are out of their control, although he and the Player
agree that their freedom is of a very limited nature. As they speak,
Hamlet walks down to the audience and spits in their direction.
He immediately wipes his eye as though he himself has just been
spat upon. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern discuss Hamlet’s condition
and strange behavior and try to sum up their situation. This summation frustrates
Rosencrantz, who laments that they experience only disconnected
scenes without any overarching narrative. As he finishes, pirates
charge the ship. The scene erupts into chaos, and Hamlet, the Player,
Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern run around the stage before leaping
into the three barrels. The lights and sounds slowly die out.

When the lights come back on, only two barrels remain.
Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and the Player emerge from the barrels
and notice that Hamlet is missing. Guildenstern despairs over this
new development, and his irritation causes him to snap at Rosencrantz, who
tries to appease him by offering him a must-win bet. Guildenstern
knocks Rosencrantz down, lashing out in anguish over the pointlessness
of their situation and life in general. Rosencrantz responds by
saying that they need to carry on. The pair begins to act out their
meeting with the English king anew, and this time Guildenstern opens
the letter and discovers that it has been substituted for a new
letter, which orders the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

The Player summons the rest of the Tragedians from the
barrel. The Tragedians form an intimidating circle around Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern, who still cannot quite believe what has happened.
The Player tells them that death is common, and Guildenstern responds
furiously, denouncing the Player’s belief that death onstage is
equivalent to real death. Guildenstern grabs a knife from the Player
and stabs him. The Player slowly dies while the Tragedians watch.
Guildenstern claims that the Player’s death represents nothing more
than the fulfillment of his inexplicable fate. The Tragedians applaud.
The Player gets up and says that his performance was only adequate,
before telling Guildenstern that the only deaths people believe
in are stage deaths. The Player shows Guildenstern that the knife
is fake.

Delighted, Rosencrantz calls for another performance.
The Player shouts orders for a wide array of deaths, which the Tragedians
act out behind him. The actors dressed as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
die as part of the theatrical carnage. Rosencrantz continues clapping
throughout. The Player involves himself in the action and mimes
being killed. As he dies, the lights dim and the Player says that death
is common and that light vanishes with life. Guildenstern replies
that real death is not theatrical but is simply the absence of anything.
Rosencrantz slowly stops clapping. The stage is silent.

Rosencrantz realizes the end is near and wonders how they
were caught up in this terrible situation. He asks if they might
remain on the ship and just avoid their fates, then he gives way
to anguish, saying that they have done nothing wrong. But he also
asks Guildenstern if they did in fact go wrong somewhere. Tellingly,
neither man can remember. Rosencrantz announces that he is glad
to be done with it all, and he vanishes from the stage. Guildenstern
does not notice, and instead he tries to recall their actions from
the beginning, believing that they must have had an opportunity
to prevent all that has befallen them. Guildenstern realizes he
is alone and begins crying out for his friend, but he is unable
to remember if he is Guildenstern or Rosencrantz. He says that they
will be better off the next time around, and he vanishes, leaving
the stage in momentary darkness.

The stage lights come up to reveal the corpses of Hamlet,
Claudius, Gertrude, and Laertes on the ground. An English ambassador announces
that they have carried out Claudius’s orders and executed Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern. Horatio laments that Claudius ordered no such
thing and begins his account of how the tragedy of Shakespeare’s
play unfolded. As he speaks, the lights descend and music rises,
drowning him out.

Analysis

As characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern become more
sympathetic as the play goes on. In Act I, their sheer inability
to focus on a topic or come to a conclusion distances the men from
the reader. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern appear as fodder for jokes,
not as sympathetic individuals. In Act II, they really want to help
their old friend Hamlet, but they also mindlessly obey Claudius,
who asks them to capture Hamlet after he kills Polonius. Rosencrantz
also fails to comfort Hamlet when he spies Hamlet walking around, muttering
to himself about whether to commit suicide. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
do not judge Hamlet for the murder, but neither do they honor Polonius
by trying to figure out why he was killed. In Act III, Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern have the opportunity to save Hamlet from death:
they could destroy the letter ordering his execution. That they
fail to destroy the letter is largely due to their inability to
understand the world, not with any malicious intent on their part.
The other events of the final act make Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
seem pathetic, which might elicit readers’ sympathies. After all,
at the end, Rosencrantz practically begs to be spared. When he receives
no answer from offstage, he gives up and walks off. Guildenstern
too mourns the fact that he does not understand why they, two ordinary
men who did not hurt anyone, have been fated to die. As the men
become more sympathetic, they more fully inhabit their “everyman”
roles. In other words, as readers begin to recognize elements of
themselves in the men’s plight, and as they see the connections
between the play and real life, sympathy for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
begins to grow.

Stoppard forces readers to interpret or visualize the
deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. He does not portray the
men being killed, so readers must first decide for themselves whether
the men are really dead and then imagine what those deaths looked
like. As the Player explains, people only believe in deaths they
witness on the stage. Having not witnessed the deaths of Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern, according to the Player’s logic, people will not
believe in the men’s deaths. At the same time, however, the very
title of Stoppard’s play says that the men have died, which echoes
the English ambassador’s assertion at the end of Act III. The men
themselves seem to waiver between believing in their deaths as decreed
by Hamlet’s letter and believing that they will not actually die.
As each man leaves the stage, he implies that he will do better
next time, as if he at least believes he will be given another chance
to live. But Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have spent the entire
play misunderstanding their circumstances, so they might simply
be misunderstanding their impending deaths as well. Nevertheless,
the new letter states that the two men will be executed upon reaching
England, a powerful argument that the men do, in fact, die at the
end of the play. As the Player points out in Act II, when a character
is written to die, that character must die without exception. Ultimately,
though, readers must decide for themselves what happens offstage
to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Unlike that of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet’s
fate is portrayed on stage. Those familiar with the play Hamlet know
that he disappears from the ship and goes back to Elsinore. Although readers
do not witness his travels or death, they do see his corpse in the
final scene of Stoppard’s play. He dies, as do Claudius, Gertrude, and
Laertes. Shakespeare describes their deaths in Hamlet, and Stoppard
expects the readers of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to
recall the multiple-death bloodbath that ends Hamlet.
The play’s final words belong to Horatio, a character from Hamlet, who sums
up the story of the prince of Denmark and the events at Elsinore.
Stoppard ends with Shakespeare’s words rather than with his own
as a way of acknowledging the importance of the earlier work. But,
in Hamlet, Horatio and another character have a
dialogue that Stoppard does not include here. While Stoppard wants
to acknowledge his debt to Shakespeare, he also wants to assert
his creative power. In his play, he controls the characters, including
when and how they speak and die. Stoppard lets Hamlet die on stage,
but he keeps the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern away from
his audience.

The entire play functions as a metaphor for the absurdity
of life. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern constantly make ridiculous
comments, and the men are wholly unable to understand their specific circumstances
or the larger forces at work in the world. For example, they applaud
as the Tragedians gather around them, mistaking the Tragedians’
evil intentions for a performance. As he leaves the stage, Guildenstern
cannot remember if he is in fact Rosencrantz or Guildenstern. Earlier
in the act, several men hide in one small barrel, a hiding spot
that nobody questions or wonders about. Although these instances
are meant to be funny, they also demonstrate the dark forces at
work. In the play, as in life, things often happen for no real reason.
People struggle to develop identities, to imbue their lives with
meaning, and to do something significant, but, in the end, everybody
dies. We want a world in which the good are rewarded and the bad
punished, but that world simply does not exist. Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern Are Dead points to horrific truths: the world
is chaotic, life is random, and the possibility of achieving success
is slight.